[5] Michelet also drew inspiration from Vico's concept of the "corsi e ricorsi", or the cyclical nature of history, in which societies rise and fall in a recurring pattern.

In Histoire de France, Michelet coined the term Renaissance (meaning "rebirth" in French) as a period in Europe's cultural history that reflected a clear break away from the Middle Ages.

The term "rebirth" and its association with the Renaissance can be traced to a work published in 1550 by the Italian art historian Giorgio Vasari.

Vasari used the term to describe the advent of a new manner of painting that began with the work of Giotto, as the "rebirth (rinascita) of the arts".

Michelet thereby became the first historian to use and define the French translation of the term, Renaissance, [6] to identify the period in Europe's cultural history that followed the Middle Ages.

[7] Historian François Furet described Histoire de France as "the cornerstone of revolutionary historiography" and "a literary monument.

At one point, he was offered a spot at the imperial printing office, but instead chose to attend the famous Collège of Lycée Charlemagne, where he distinguished himself.

These books do not display the apocalyptic style which, partly borrowed from Lamennais, characterizes Michelet's later works, but they contain almost the whole of his curious ethico-politico-theological creed—a mixture of sentimentalism, communism, and anti-sacerdotalism, supported by the most eccentric arguments, but urged with a great deal of eloquence.

[3] The principles of the outbreaks of 1848 were in the air and Michelet was one of many who condensed and propagated them: his original lectures were of so incendiary a kind that the course had to be interdicted.

After the coup d'état by Napoleon III in 1852, Michelet lost his position in the Record Office when he refused to swear fealty to the empire.

[10] It reads, "Comment se fait-il qu'il y ait sur la terre une femme seule?"

Nos fils (1869), the last of the smaller books published during the author's life, is a tractate on education, written with knowledge in a manner that highlights Michelet's research capabilities.

The first of these deals with early French history up to the death of Charlemagne; the second with the flourishing time of feudal France; the third with the thirteenth century; the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes with the Hundred Years' War; the seventh and eighth with the establishment of the royal power under Charles VII and Louis XI.

Themes of the empty and the turgid included the Middle Ages, the imitation, tedium, the novel, narcotics, Alexander, and plethoric (engorged blood).

"[15] His framing of history as a struggle between Christian spirit and liberty against Jewish matter, fatality, and tyranny, is seen by Nirenberg as an example of anti-Judaism as a constituent conceptual tool in western thought.

[16] Michelet was perhaps the first historian to devote himself to anything resembling a picturesque history of the Middle Ages and his account is still one of the most vivid that exists.

His inquiry into manuscript and printed authorities was most laborious, but his lively imagination, and his strong religious and political prejudices, made him regard all things from a singularly personal point of view.

However, Michelet's insistence that history should concentrate on "the people, and not only its leaders or its institutions",[17] clearly drew inspiration from the French Revolution.

Uncompromisingly hostile as Michelet was to the empire, its downfall in 1870 in the midst of France's defeat by Prussia followed by the rise and fall of the Paris Commune the next year once more stimulated him to activity.

Not only did he write letters and pamphlets during the struggle, but when it was over he was determined to complete the vast task that his two great histories had almost covered by a Histoire du XIXe siècle.

He did not, however, live to carry it further than the Battle of Waterloo, and the best criticism of it is perhaps contained in the opening words of the introduction to the last volume—"l'âge me presse" ("age hurries me").

The new republic was not altogether a restoration for Michelet; his professorship at the Collège de France, of which he always contended he had been unjustly deprived, was not given back to him.

[19] Michelet accorded Athénaïs literary rights to his books and papers before he died, acknowledging the significant role she had in what he published during his later years.